


Beneath the Well

by macabre



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Healers, M/M, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-02
Updated: 2010-06-02
Packaged: 2017-11-08 12:36:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/443254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Dean has a failing heart. A stranger in a trench coat shows up in his hospital room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beneath the Well

Dean is in the shower when he collapses, which is embarrassing enough, having his little brother pull him out of the ugly, off-white bathtub in their grungy motel room. He’s half-conscious – feels the pain, feels the chill of the air outside the running water, and he can see Sam’s face panicking. It begins to look as red as Dean’s boiling skin.

His brother drives him to the ER. Dean is paralyzed in the backseat, wrapped in towels. He can’t even think until two days later when the doctors scratch their heads and say he has some previously undetected heart condition. Sam catches his eye and they both think of the same incident in a damp basement two years ago.

Sam has a serious breakdown. He goes through all the same research again, looking for another miracle worker. Dean shakes his head and turns up the volume on the TV whenever he tries to talk about it. He couldn’t accept something like that again.

His brother goes from jittery mess to broken down within a week. He sits half-asleep in the chair next to his bed. He listens to his heart monitor. Sits up only to make sure Dean takes all the medicine the nurses give him.

Dean asks when they’ll hit the road; his skin is crawling and he finds himself longing for Lawrence.

Sam never answers.

After hours one night, Dean is half-heartedly watching out the window when a shooting star flashes by. He snorts. Less than an hour later, Dean belatedly realizes someone is standing in his door.

The man is striking looking. Pale blue eyes. The darkest hair. Slender. Doesn’t appear threatening, but Dean stops breathing for a moment because alarm bells are going off somewhere in his head.

“Hey buddy, can I help you?” Dean yells, half hoping a nurse will hear.

The stranger doesn’t say a word. He looks around Dean’s room before settling his eyes on Dean. Then he turns and walks down the wall. Doesn’t come back.

Until the next night when the TV wakes Dean as the channel switches shows. He blearily turns over and sees the man sitting in the chair next to his bed.

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean struggles to upright himself but the drugs make him sluggish and tired. His mouth feels full of cotton; his body rubber.

“What do you want?” Dean knows there is a devil’s trap under his bed. Possibly more traps. He’s been too out of it to watch Sam.

The stranger smiles. It’s an odd smile, doesn’t make Dean feel at ease. “I require nothing of you.”

“Bullshit.” Dean feels too hot. “What’s your name?”

“Castiel.” He leans forward, reaching for the hunter. Dean backs up until he can feel the cool side bar through his thin shirt. The man doesn’t relent – he pushes his hand against his forehead and frowns.

“You are more ill than I originally believed.”

Dean snorts. He’s too tired to pull himself away. He feels delirious.

“No shit, Sherlock. They don’t keep people in hospitals for nothing.”

“What’s Sherlock?”

Dean grunts; he doesn’t even care if the guy is there to kill him at this point. He’s just tired. There’s no point when the doctors give you a very definite date.

He doesn’t remember closing his eyes, but he does remember the cool press of fingers against his head a second time before sleep comes.

Dean asks his brother during the day if he has seen a guy wearing a trench coat around the hospital. “Looks like a tax accountant?”

Sam shakes his head. “Is something wrong?”

There are a lot of things wrong, Dean thinks, and this guy pales in comparison to most. Which is why, the next night, when the man seems to appear out of thin air, Dean doesn’t panic. He blinks rapidly and curses the IV for making his mind slow.

“Cas, right?”

“Castiel.”

Dean half-smiles and shrugs. He is no longer alarmed by the fact he can’t feel his arms when they stick new needles in. “What’s your story?”

Castiel frowns. “A long one.”

“I’ve got time.”

The man stares at him. Dean ordinarily would have told anyone who looked at him like that to piss off. When Cas leans forward and slowly raises his hand, Dean thinks he’s going nurse on him again. The man lightly touches his neck and slips his hand under Dean’s shirt; he presses his palm over his heart.

Dean swallows. He can’t move. He feels warm – head spinning. Castiel is close to him. Too close. And he’s feeling his heart.

It’s an oddly intimate thing coming from an odd man. Dean feels out of sorts with this touch.

Cas cranes his neck to look at him from where he hovers over the hunter’s chest.

Dean swallows.

“You may have less time than you think.” It isn’t the words that hit him so much as the look of pure anguish on the guy’s face.

A surprising sting of tears in the back of Dean’s eyes. He doesn’t have anything to say to that because it’s probably true. He feels its truth settling in by the hours.

Castiel stays the rest of the night.

Another week passes. Dean hardly notices. He spends most of his time sleeping. When he’s awake, it’s hard to concentrate. His chest feels hollowed out. He knows one thing: that after Sam spends the waking hours sitting with him, silently crying when he thinks Dean can’t see it, Cas comes. Every night. And no one bothers him.

“No one notices you except me. Does that make you my invisible friend? A coping mechanism? My guardian angel?”

His voice may be dying, but his companion looks sharp at this, and in older days Dean might have guessed there was some truth to this by his reaction. Now he thinks it’s all the drugs talking.

Later he realizes that Cas has been holding his hand the entire time and he can’t feel it.

It’s when he can’t open his eyes at all that Dean feels how warm the room becomes with Cas in it. Only when he’s there. He knows this because it gets hard to breathe.

From one minute floating, the next blazing. Suddenly, he isn’t numb anymore. His chest feels like his heart exploded – his eyes are forced open as the monitor frantically beeps. His vision is blurry, but he can make out Castiel’s face hovering above his.

His hand is pressed down on his chest. Dean tries to focus, he really does – because he’s starting to think he’s hallucinating as he goes out. To him, it looks like Castiel’s hand is pressed _inside_ his chest, his hand disappearing to the wrist.

Dean chokes. He hears the flatline call of the monitor before he sinks.

 

 

 

 

No one is more surprised than him when he wakes up days later. Sam’s eyes are completely bloodshot. Bobby is there. Bobby brings him flowers. Dean is going to make fun of him for it as soon as he feels safe to talk.

The doctors call it a miracle. Dean has somehow worked another miracle for himself. He doesn’t know how to feel, now that the drugs have eased off and he’s being released shortly.

While he won’t be back in perfect shape for some time, the doctors say scans show growth of new tissue around his heart. They say it looks like a completely different heart.

He doesn’t speak again until the last night in the hospital. Castiel appears in his doorway, leaning there like he knew everything would work out.

Dean doesn’t know what to say, but he feels like he has to say something. “Why am I the only one that sees you?”

“You’re the only one I let see me.”

Dean nods, like it all makes perfect sense. “Will I see you again?”

Cas smiles. It’s radiant. “I believe you will.”

Stepping into the room, Castiel braces Dean’s upper arm and leans in. Dean should be used to the man getting in his personal space, but his heart speeds up.

Cas gently kisses Dean’s forehead. Dean tenses, would squirm if Cas wasn’t still so close.

“May God be with you.”

A month later and Dean hunts a vampire nest with Sam. He hasn’t seen Castiel since the hospital, but he remembers the folds of his coat and the loose tie he always wore. He thinks about the strange intimacy they shared for a short time, and how it’s the closest he’s felt to anyone besides Sam.

He doesn’t dare admit he misses him, a stranger. He could have been a figment of his imagination the whole time, he was on so much medication.

But he doesn’t believe this, because the place where Castiel touched his arm burned for days, like a handprint was seared into his skin. And his heart.

Well, his heart beats with a new ferocity. Somehow, Dean thinks Cas left his mark there.


End file.
